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The IT-system that stole Christmas
Handing its traveller loyalty program a new challenge, a crash of Comair's IT system that assigns crews to flights on Saturday caused 30,000 US travellers to miss Christmas. The IT mess forced the Delta airlines subsidiary to cancel all of its 1,100 flights on Saturday. Today (Sunday) the company expects only limited flight activity while the mop crews are going through the data centre.
The cause can be summarised as:
winter storms = run out of de-icer fluid on Thursday = flight cancellations = rescheduling nightmare = IT overload.
Stranded passengers won't get to their final destination until Monday.
Similar problems caused US Airways passengers to spend the Holidays without their luggage.
In a move that could only have sprouted from the evil mind of the boss from the Dilbert comic, the airline offered Shirley Malave a $50 stipend to buy clothing after she arrived in Tampa, Florida without her bags on a US Airways flight. All stores of course we closed on Saturday for Christmas. "They ruined everybody's Christmas," sobbed Malave to the AP reporter.
December 26, 2004 at 03:52 PM | Permalink
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